If, sick of the brutality of the schools, we seek those rare cases in which a home education was substituted, we are generally rewarded by finding the comforts greater and the cramming worse. It is simply impossible for a pedagogue to try and wring from a hundred brains the excess of work which may, under clever treatment, be extracted from one; and so the Eton boys, with all their manifold miseries, were at least spared the peculiar experiments which were too often tried upon solitary scholars. Nowadays anxious parents and guardians seem to labor under an ill-founded apprehension that their children are going to hurt themselves by over-application to their books, and we hear a great deal about the expedience of restraining this inordinate zeal. But a few generations back such comfortable theories had yet to be evolved, and the plain duty of a teacher was to goad the student on to every effort in his power.
Perhaps the two most striking instances of home training that have been given to the world are those of John Stuart Mill and Giacomo Leopardi; the principal difference being that, while the English boy was crammed
